Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) apparently felt President Joe Biden used dehumanizing language when referring to Laken Riley’s killer as an “illegal immigrant,” saying the president should have been more considerate with his reference.
“He should have said undocumented, but that’s not a big thing, OK?” Pelosi said during a CNN recap of the president’s State of the Union on Thursday. The tone-deaf take came in response to Biden’s acknowledgement that the 22-year-old University of Georgia was allegedly murdered by an illegal migrant who crossed the southern border within the past year.
“I wasn’t going to ask about that, but you do think he should have used the term undocumented?” asked a host.
“Well we say undocumented,” Pelosi replied, presumably referring to her fellow Democrats.
While numerous crimes have been attributed to recent entrants into the country as part of a historic surge in illegal crossings, the murder of Riley has incensed bipartisan outrage and raised thorny questions about whether the Biden administration is doing enough to prevent Americans from becoming the victims of crimes at the hands of violent migrants. Other high-profile instances of violence include the attack on New York City police officers by multiple migrants who were later released without bail and obscenely gestured to cameras in disregard.
Immigration remains top of mind for American voters in an election year, with more than one in four calling the issue the most important facing the country. Even worse for Biden, 55% of Americans view the “large numbers of immigrants entering the United States illegally” as a “critical threat” to the United States over the next 10 years, according to Gallup. Another poll shows that, for the first time on record, a majority 53% of Americans support President Trump’s original call to build a nonporous border wall between Mexico and the U.S.
Democrats have seized on the scuttling of an immigration deal in the Senate, placing the blame on Republicans for walking away from a deal that would have allowed up to 5,000 illegal crossings to occur per day. Meanwhile, GOP candidates have emphasized that many parts of the wall remain incomplete, allowing for hundreds of crossings per minute to occur while the Department of Homeland Security is prohibited from addressing the openings.
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